Web Worker Daily

WWD’s Mike Gunderloy covered Mozilla’s Weave project back in December, noting its usefulness in synchronizing bookmarks between a user’s various installations of Firefox…essentially moving a Firefox user profile into the cloud.

Monday saw the release of a major update to Weave, bringing in several new features and, tellingly, locating Weave at a subdomain of Mozilla, named ‘services‘, implying that Weave will be the umbrella for a number of web-based service coming from Mozilla’s commercial arm. Also telling is the hackable and very social URL issued to a user on signup (in my case, http://services.mozilla.com/user/imran)

So what’s new?

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It should be obvious by now that here at Web Worker Daily we are big fans of the Firefox web browser. We’ve covered the recent launch of Version 3 in detail and have published a good number of round-ups highlighting useful add-ons.

Everyone has their own reasons for choosing Firefox but for me it’s mostly a matter of efficiency. I feel that the add-ons that are available let me work smarter and get more done in less time. That’s why I was particularly intrigued when I heard about the DejaClick extension which promotes itself as a web recorder and Super Bookmark utility.

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Tommorow sees the long-awaited release of Clint Eastwood’s Firefox 3, the third movie in the popular series of Craig Thomas novels, including Firefox, Firefox Down and Winter Hawk.

As with most cinematic releases, the movie will be available as a Usenet file or BitTorrent, however Eastwood is celebrating the release by - get this - attempting to set a Guinness World Record for the most software downloaded in 24 hours…finally Hollywood is learning to embrace DRM-free digital downloads and user-generated piracy! I wonder if Eastwood’s next movie Release Candidate will also be similarly released into the wild?

Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be much in the public domain abou…oh, um…I may have misunderstood some of the facts <gulps> of Om’s briefing…

M’kay…lemme start over…

I guess everyone’s aware (thanks Mike!) that tomorrow sees the long-awaited release of Mozilla’s Firefox 3, the third browser in the popular series of open source browsers, including (um) Firefox 1 and (ahem) Firefox 2?

Mozilla is celebrating the release by - get this - attempting to set a Guinness World Record for the most software downloaded in 24 hours. All you need to do to help contribute to the record is download Firefox 3 during tomorrow’s Download Day and pledging that you’ll do so at the official world record site.

So far 1,385,062 individuals have pledged to download our ubiquitous foxy friend, including 56,300 of my fellow Britons! Accompanying the launch and the record attempt are a global series of launch parties - check for local parties at Mozilla Party Central.

Most importantly - and I can’t stress this enough - Think In Russian!

The folks at Vysr announced today the release of Business and Social Packs for their RoamAbout Platform. RoamAbout provides contextual access to your favorite web services and social networks without leaving your source site, and these targeted collections significantly extend their offering.

The Business Pack is aimed for productivity with hooks for news and finance along with Wikipedia, while the Social Pack brings Flickr, YouTube and Twitter on board. The Web Worker will likely need both, and the extension does allow you to customize the interface to choose the desired services.

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A month ago, I reviewed Zemanta, the blogging extensions service company that provides contextual images, links, latest articles or blog posts and tags to your blog posts. I was a little harsh on the somewhat lack of relevant images and sometimes even irrelevant links that Zemanta offered up to me in their feature bar that appeared neatly embedded in my Typepad and Blogger publishing tools. I think my exact words were “all hell broke loose.”

Since then, I’ve still not incorporated Zemanta suggested items into this WWD blog but have used them more and more often on some of my other blogs, particularly my personal blogs where I have less stringent writers guidelines to follow and anything goes because they’re mine. Now Zemanta has added a few more features that have caught my attention.

Zemanta says their tools can help increase traffic to your blog because of:

1. better annotation of posts, links, images with actual crawlers for Google and Yahoo can rate the post higher and glean more context from your post; and

2. placement of links to related posts across blogosphere helps get more track back for the post which can also increase traffic. Read the rest of this entry »

Like a lot of Web Workers, I am fairly dependent on the Google suite of applications, and with good reason. They are feature rich, they’re reliable, I can get to them from anywhere on just about any hardware, and they’re free.

That doesn’t mean that they are perfect though. Each application has it’s own quirks and improvement is always possible. Thankfully, if you’re a Firefox user you can tweak these and other applications to add some really great functionality using the Greasemonkey add-on. We’ve talked about the benefits of Greasemonkey in the past, and with an impressive library of scripts available it can be used to modify quite a few web applications, including those made by Google.

Here are some of the more useful scripts I have discovered in my travels that help my Google experience be even more productive:

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In a syndication world we are often overwhelmed with information. It is incredible that information once far away has been brought near, but we need to find some order for the chaos. There are a few ways that I’ve learned to manage my reading material to be digested in an organized manner.

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